Health briefs: Overworked, underpaid more likely to get Type 2 diabetes

Working long hours may increase the risk for Type 2 diabetes, a review has found, but the risk is apparent only in workers of lower socio­economic status.

Long working hours are associated with diabetes risk factors — work stress, sleep disturbances, depression and unhealthy lifestyle — and some studies have found long hours associated with increased risk for cardiovascular disease.

Researchers combined data from 19 published and unpublished studies on more than 222,000 men and women in several countries. The analysis, published in the Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, found no effect of working hours in higher socioeconomic groups. But in workers of lower socioeconomic status, working more than 55 hours a week increased the risk for Type 2 diabetes by nearly 30 percent. The association persisted after excluding shift workers and adjusting for age, sex, obesity and physical activity.

Sometimes a missing set of keys is just that — an inconvenience borne of lapsed attention. But a new study suggests that when seniors report they are plagued by missing keys, forgotten appointments, words that can't be retrieved and names that don't come, those complaints should not be lightly dismissed.

A study published in the journal Neurology found that after age 60, "cognitive complainers" — people who say they have noticed mental slippage — are more likely than those who do not complain of such changes to develop mild cognitive impairment, and to have Alzheimer's-like plaques and tangles in their brains upon death even when dementia was never diagnosed.

For the initial diagnosis of kidney stones, ultrasounds may be a better choice than CT scans, a new study has found. Both techniques may be effective, but CT scans are more expensive and deliver a large dose of radiation.

For the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers randomly assigned 2,759 people with symptoms of kidney stones in the emergency room to one of three groups: ultrasonography by the ER doctor, ultrasonography by a radiologist, or a CT scan.

Pancreatic cancer is nasty, sneaky and nearly impervious to the effects of chemotherapy, and its dispiriting five-year survival rate of 6 percent has budged not at all in decades. But researchers at the Salk Institute in California reported last week that they have found a way to unmask this stone-cold killer and render it vulnerable to standard cancer treatments.

Using a chemically modified version of vitamin D, the Salk scientists appear to have kicked open the doors to the vault within which pancreatic tumors flourish — in mice, at least. That exposes this most inexorable of cancers to the immune system — and chemotherapy.

In mice with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, the addition of this vitamin D analog, called Calcipotriol, to chemotherapy prolonged survival by 57 percent over chemotherapy alone. Treated with a regimen of the cancer drug gemcitabine-plus-Calcipotriol, nearly 3 in 10 of the mice in their experiments were considered "long-term" survivors: They lived an average of 53 days after treatment began, three to four times longer than those who got gemcitabine alone.